Chinese Cooking For Dummies
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Egg rolls, spring rolls, and wontons consist of thin wrappers containing bits of deliciousness. You can find premade Chinese wrappers with the right shape and size to accommodate any Chinese appetizer you want to wrap. Make sure that you have the right wrapper for your appetizer.

  • Egg roll wrappers: These classic wrappers are made from wheat flour, eggs, and water. The dough gets rolled into thin, large, pliable squares with a golden yellow, wheaty color. As the name implies, they are designed to wrap the crunchy American-Chinese restaurant favorite called the egg roll. But you can also wrap egg roll wrappers around other fillings.

  • Spring roll wrappers: Unlike egg roll wrappers, spring roll wrappers contain no eggs — just wheat flour and water. Cooks pour the thin batter onto the wok surface and steam it to form a paper-thin pancake that’s thinner than egg roll wrappers and a lighter, grayer color (due to the lack of eggs in the batter). Spring rolls also fry up crispier and have a smoother, lighter-textured surface.

  • Wonton and potsticker wrappers: Like egg roll wrappers, wonton and potsticker wrappers contain eggs, as well as wheat flour and water. Thus, they have the same texture and tawny color as their egg-roll cousins. However, these wrappers are much smaller in size — usually around 3 1⁄2 inches in diameter. They also come in a greater variety of thicknesses and shapes.

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Martin Yan hosts the award-winning TV show Yan Can Cook, broadcast on 240 U.S. stations and in 70 countries internationally. His bestselling cookbooks include Martin Yan's Feast and Martin Yan's Invitation to Chinese Cooking.

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